Release v. (Installation)
Requests is an Apache2 Licensed HTTP library, written in Python, for human beings.
Python’s standard urllib2 module provides most of the HTTP capabilities you need, but the API is thoroughly broken. It was built for a different time — and a different web. It requires an enormous amount of work (even method overrides) to perform the simplest of tasks.
Things shouldn’t be this way. Not in Python.
>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf8'
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.text
u'{"type":"User"...'
>>> r.json()
{u'private_gists': 419, u'total_private_repos': 77, ...}
See similar code, without Requests.
Requests takes all of the work out of Python HTTP/1.1 — making your integration with web services seamless. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your POST data. Keep-alive and HTTP connection pooling are 100% automatic, powered by urllib3, which is embedded within Requests.
Amazon, Google, Twilio, Mozilla, Heroku, PayPal, NPR, Obama for America, Transifex, Native Instruments, The Washington Post, Twitter, SoundCloud, Kippt, Readability, and Federal US Institutions use Requests internally. It has been downloaded over 1,500,000 times from PyPI.
Requests is the perfect example how beautiful an API can be with the right level of abstraction.
I’m going to get @kennethreitz’s Python requests module tattooed on my body, somehow. The whole thing.
Nuked a 1200 LOC spaghetti code library with 10 lines of code thanks to @kennethreitz’s request library. Today has been AWESOME.
Python HTTP: When in doubt, or when not in doubt, use Requests. Beautiful, simple, Pythonic.
Requests is ready for today’s web.
International Domains and URLs
Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
Sessions with Cookie Persistence
Browser-style SSL Verification
Basic/Digest Authentication
Elegant Key/Value Cookies
Automatic Decompression
Unicode Response Bodies
Multipart File Uploads
Connection Timeouts
.netrc support
Python 2.6—3.3
Thread-safe.
This part of the documentation, which is mostly prose, begins with some background information about Requests, then focuses on step-by-step instructions for getting the most out of Requests.
This part of the documentation, which is mostly prose, details the Requests ecosystem and community.
If you are looking for information on a specific function, class or method, this part of the documentation is for you.
If you want to contribute to the project, this part of the documentation is for you.